Introducing the Sim Balance Team
Back in season 27, a small team led by @JPach consisting primarily of me, @Swanty, and @Pat with help from a few other veterans of the league rolled out a comprehensive transfer of the league from the previous version of the sim (Draft Day Sports: Pro Football 2016, or DDSPF16) to the new and shiny DDSPF21. Since then, aside from some balance changes rolled out the following offseason, you haven’t heard much from us.
In spite of our silence, the three of us have continued to keep tabs on game balance and trends within the league, as well as doing some behind the scenes work with important groups like the sim team. This post serves to re-introduce us to the league as a whole as the Sim Balance Department, a new league department that will be tasked with monitoring game balance and making periodic changes to the league when necessary to increase the realism and fun of the simmed games. As you may have guessed from me being the one making this post, I am excited to announce that I will be the first head of this department.
As it’s been a while without word on game balance and other issues with the sim, we wanted to make this post outlining our current plans for continued monitoring of game balances and how we will make any necessary changes moving forward. This is not an announcement of any balance patch, but instead an overview on the team’s role within the league moving forward and how we will approach any future changes. Also, we will provide information at the end about our plans to expand the team, so make sure to read that if you are interested in helping out!
Balancing Act
Alarm bells probably started ringing for some readers when I said in the introduction that the sim balance team would be making periodic changes to the league. We know that some of the decisions made during the initial sim transfer and the follow-up balance patch have been controversial, and so we are making important considerations at this stage to decide upon a fair process that will hopefully be able to generate broad consensus with the changes we recommend. This process will include careful deliberation on our end about the scope and necessity of the changes, thorough testing of the impacts of any changes that we will make, and consultation with other involved groups in advance of the final announcement and implementation.
The first stage of making any changes to the league will involve the sim balance team deciding what issues, if any, exist in game balance at present and what means we can use to address those issues. In identifying issues to tackle, we want to balance a responsiveness to community input with consideration of data resulting from both league games and dedicated sim testing. Our current plan is to implement a comprehensive review and balance patch cycle once every 6 to 7 seasons, lining up roughly with a calendar year. This will allow for a decent stretch of time between balance patches where league conditions can remain relatively stable for teams to plan around and for us to accumulate a large enough sample size to feel confident in our assessment of league balance.
Once we have selected some areas of concern that we feel are sufficiently large drains on league enjoyment that we need to take some actions, we have many avenues that we will be able to pursue to do so. This can involve one or more of the following:
- Changing league-wide settings (as we did with the run yardage modifier in the S28 offseason balance patch)
- Changing league files, such as playbooks (as we did in the emergency fix for DPI in the Penalties.xml file)
- Changing sim-specific league rules, such as changing how depth charts are set or adding/removing certain options from team gameplans (as we did for offensive formations after RBBC was fixed to work correctly)
- Changing positional archetypes (as we did for safety and RB in the S28 offseason balance patch)
These are ordered roughly from smallest to largest impact on the league userbase as a whole, and we will make efforts to work only at the lowest level needed to effect sufficient change. Archetype changes in particular can create confusion and extra work for many users and departments around the league, so this will be an option that we aim to take only when we feel it’s truly necessary.
After identifying issues and brainstorming some ideas of how to approach addressing them in ways that will create minimal adverse impact, we will of course do thorough testing of these proposed changes to make sure that they work in ways that we anticipate and do not create any adverse effects in other areas of the league. This work in particular is a large ask for a 3-person team, even with our existing experience from the initial sim transfer, and so we are hopeful that we will be able to add a few more members to the team who can assist with this in particular. More details below.
Finally, one thing we took to heart from the feedback on the initial sim transfer and continue to work towards is improving the approach to communicating information on any changes that we recommend to the league. While we have not finalized details, we are working to establish processes to communicate our work on balance changes in advance of their implementation to GMs and other impacted departments ahead of time to use their feedback throughout the entire process. Our goal is also to announce any anticipated changes with at least one season warning to the general userbase so that the public has a healthy period in advance to know what will be changing.
Perfectly Balanced
As I wrote earlier, implementing this thorough review, decision-making, and testing process will be a daunting task with only a three person team. We’re looking to add a couple of interns to the team this offseason to help us start to ramp up for the next balance patch!
This batch of interns will be the first set of people added to the team since the initial sim transfer effort, so it’s a great opportunity to be a key contributor to sim balance in coming seasons. We will be looking for people who are eager to learn more about the sim, who care strongly about the league as a whole and are able to set aside individual team/player loyalties, and who are willing and capable of keeping their work under wraps until the appropriate time that information will be revealed.
Ideally we’d like to add some people who have experience with sim testing in DDPSF 21 to help scale up our testing process for potential fixes. While testing is definitely a technical priority, we are also always happy to add different perspectives on league balance and voices that will contribute positively to discussions on potential changes to the league. An interest in statistics is also recommended.
If you're interested in helping this effort, please apply by DMing me on Discord (slate#4532). Job pay will be $6M as an intern, with potential for additional bonus pay based on the amount of sim testing work done and other contributions to the team.
Thank you very much for reading! We look forward to continuing our work to help make the league as enjoyable as possible.
Back in season 27, a small team led by @JPach consisting primarily of me, @Swanty, and @Pat with help from a few other veterans of the league rolled out a comprehensive transfer of the league from the previous version of the sim (Draft Day Sports: Pro Football 2016, or DDSPF16) to the new and shiny DDSPF21. Since then, aside from some balance changes rolled out the following offseason, you haven’t heard much from us.
In spite of our silence, the three of us have continued to keep tabs on game balance and trends within the league, as well as doing some behind the scenes work with important groups like the sim team. This post serves to re-introduce us to the league as a whole as the Sim Balance Department, a new league department that will be tasked with monitoring game balance and making periodic changes to the league when necessary to increase the realism and fun of the simmed games. As you may have guessed from me being the one making this post, I am excited to announce that I will be the first head of this department.
As it’s been a while without word on game balance and other issues with the sim, we wanted to make this post outlining our current plans for continued monitoring of game balances and how we will make any necessary changes moving forward. This is not an announcement of any balance patch, but instead an overview on the team’s role within the league moving forward and how we will approach any future changes. Also, we will provide information at the end about our plans to expand the team, so make sure to read that if you are interested in helping out!
Balancing Act
Alarm bells probably started ringing for some readers when I said in the introduction that the sim balance team would be making periodic changes to the league. We know that some of the decisions made during the initial sim transfer and the follow-up balance patch have been controversial, and so we are making important considerations at this stage to decide upon a fair process that will hopefully be able to generate broad consensus with the changes we recommend. This process will include careful deliberation on our end about the scope and necessity of the changes, thorough testing of the impacts of any changes that we will make, and consultation with other involved groups in advance of the final announcement and implementation.
The first stage of making any changes to the league will involve the sim balance team deciding what issues, if any, exist in game balance at present and what means we can use to address those issues. In identifying issues to tackle, we want to balance a responsiveness to community input with consideration of data resulting from both league games and dedicated sim testing. Our current plan is to implement a comprehensive review and balance patch cycle once every 6 to 7 seasons, lining up roughly with a calendar year. This will allow for a decent stretch of time between balance patches where league conditions can remain relatively stable for teams to plan around and for us to accumulate a large enough sample size to feel confident in our assessment of league balance.
Once we have selected some areas of concern that we feel are sufficiently large drains on league enjoyment that we need to take some actions, we have many avenues that we will be able to pursue to do so. This can involve one or more of the following:
- Changing league-wide settings (as we did with the run yardage modifier in the S28 offseason balance patch)
- Changing league files, such as playbooks (as we did in the emergency fix for DPI in the Penalties.xml file)
- Changing sim-specific league rules, such as changing how depth charts are set or adding/removing certain options from team gameplans (as we did for offensive formations after RBBC was fixed to work correctly)
- Changing positional archetypes (as we did for safety and RB in the S28 offseason balance patch)
These are ordered roughly from smallest to largest impact on the league userbase as a whole, and we will make efforts to work only at the lowest level needed to effect sufficient change. Archetype changes in particular can create confusion and extra work for many users and departments around the league, so this will be an option that we aim to take only when we feel it’s truly necessary.
After identifying issues and brainstorming some ideas of how to approach addressing them in ways that will create minimal adverse impact, we will of course do thorough testing of these proposed changes to make sure that they work in ways that we anticipate and do not create any adverse effects in other areas of the league. This work in particular is a large ask for a 3-person team, even with our existing experience from the initial sim transfer, and so we are hopeful that we will be able to add a few more members to the team who can assist with this in particular. More details below.
Finally, one thing we took to heart from the feedback on the initial sim transfer and continue to work towards is improving the approach to communicating information on any changes that we recommend to the league. While we have not finalized details, we are working to establish processes to communicate our work on balance changes in advance of their implementation to GMs and other impacted departments ahead of time to use their feedback throughout the entire process. Our goal is also to announce any anticipated changes with at least one season warning to the general userbase so that the public has a healthy period in advance to know what will be changing.
Perfectly Balanced
As I wrote earlier, implementing this thorough review, decision-making, and testing process will be a daunting task with only a three person team. We’re looking to add a couple of interns to the team this offseason to help us start to ramp up for the next balance patch!
This batch of interns will be the first set of people added to the team since the initial sim transfer effort, so it’s a great opportunity to be a key contributor to sim balance in coming seasons. We will be looking for people who are eager to learn more about the sim, who care strongly about the league as a whole and are able to set aside individual team/player loyalties, and who are willing and capable of keeping their work under wraps until the appropriate time that information will be revealed.
Ideally we’d like to add some people who have experience with sim testing in DDPSF 21 to help scale up our testing process for potential fixes. While testing is definitely a technical priority, we are also always happy to add different perspectives on league balance and voices that will contribute positively to discussions on potential changes to the league. An interest in statistics is also recommended.
If you're interested in helping this effort, please apply by DMing me on Discord (slate#4532). Job pay will be $6M as an intern, with potential for additional bonus pay based on the amount of sim testing work done and other contributions to the team.
Thank you very much for reading! We look forward to continuing our work to help make the league as enjoyable as possible.